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Eating Out With Comrades

By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN; Michael T. Kaufman, who has just completed an assignment in Eastern Europe, is on a leave of absence from The New York Times and is working on a book.

Published: October 4, 1987

Correction Appended

During the quarter of my life that I have spent abroad, I have learned a good many things that have eased my passage, though some of them, I think, may have taxed my soul. I have, for instance, been able to secure four empty seats on 747's much of the time. I have broken the blockades of desk clerks and have gone over the heads of hotel managers to secure shelter.

Over time, as shame atrophied, I grew to tip, cajole, wheedle and snarl in pursuit of comfort and necessity, no doubt losing grace as I gained succor. And, for the last three years, I have employed skills acquired in places like Djibouti, Lagos, Gangtok and Patna in order to eat out in the East Bloc.

While some of this eating out, notably in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, has involved eating well and delightedly, in other instances the experience has entailed less sensual experimentation and sybaritic pleasure than simple biological need - to eat, not as in to dine, but rather as in not to starve. There are vast regions of Eastern Europe where luck and dollars will not help and where what is required is guile.

The major exception is the gustatory enclave of Hungary. Hungarian cuisine is as complex as a Bartok composition; meats and fresh vegetables are displayed everywhere as abundantly as at a rich farmer's wedding, and the schlag, or cream, on the pastries is as thick as the hyperbole in this paragraph. The point is that, as in Paris, any idiot with money can eat happily in Budapest, and the point is also that my repertory of smarmy ploys was never needed. Even in the kitschy tourist joints such as the Danube boats, where maids in embroidered peasant dress jig with wine jugs on their heads, the food is good and the portions ample.

Even so, I managed to locate some truly sensational places whose general whereabouts and strengths I am prepared to reveal. There is the Kispipa, which is a beauty. It serves about a half-dozen fixed-price four-course meals for roughly $2.50. There are also dozens of other dishes on the a la carte menu that are both succulent and unpronounceable, full of sour cream, fresh fruits, fish, game, paprika, forbidding sz and gy combinations and umlauts.

The restaurant is a privately owned cooperative, and in its enthusiasm and bustle the staff stands in marked contrast to the bored legions of East Bloc waiters who on the whole would prefer their patrons to fast or at least go somewhere else.

While Kispipa is my overall favorite, the best fancy restaurant between the Elbe and Vladivostok (this, I realize, is an awesomely sweeping pronouncement, since the distance involved is about 6,500 miles, but I stand by it) is a small privately run cellar called Legrady's.

The waiters are dressed in cutaways, the silver is antique and the tables are set far apart from each other, and the seats are armchairs. The goose livers are spectacular and the orange souffle is fundamentally decadent. A dinner for two with everything you can imagine can cost as much as $50.

A better-known haunt is the Hungaria Cafe in what at the turn of the century used to be the New York Hotel. This is not private and the food and service tend toward dismal. Still, it is worth dropping in for coffee just to soak up the Art Deco and the Secessionist glitz, listen to the gypsy music and watch the floor show, which also involves more jigging with wine jugs and slap dancing.

It is also not too difficult to eat well in Czechoslovakia. In addition to the dumplings, schnitzel, ham, duck and sausage that are the readily available staples of Czech menus, Prague has the only Argentine and only Indian restaurants that I know of in the East Bloc, and after a steady diet of bland Slavic fare, a tongue-scalding vindaloo is particularly welcome to be washed down with superb Pilsener beer.

Prague has restaurants that close relatively early, wine bars that serve food until late, and robust beer halls. There is a particularly fine restaurant called Pavouk (which means spider in Czech), but a visitor will have to ask concierges to make reservations and pinpoint the place, for it is in the basement of a building with no sign. The Green Frog and the Golden Deer are pleasant wine bars. A good place for lunch is a fish restaurant with no name that sits on the bank of the Vltava down the stairs from Engels Quay near the Palackeho Bridge.

The restaurants of the major hotels are quite pleasant, but the best I found was at the Three Ostriches (Hotel U Tri Pstrosu). This hotel has 13 rooms and is situated in an almost cloyingly romantic spot beside the Gothic Charles Bridge, which I imagine would have been a terrific place for me to have trysted with Marina Vlady. As a hotel the place is always booked two months in advance and here, I confess, the skills that served me well in Lagos failed, and I was never able to get a room, let alone meet Ms. Vlady, for whom I have waited with patient love for almost 30 years since I saw her play a witch in a French film. A meal at the Three Ostriches, however, was easy and well advised.